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Modern baby quilt part 2

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Hi there! I’m back with part 2 on how to make a modern baby quilt. See part 1 here [2].

We left off last week with the quilt top finished, like this:

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Today I’ll walk you through the remaining steps to turn the top into a great quilt!

Here’s what you’ll need:

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The remainder of the grey sheeting fabric [4], quilt basting spray, coordinating/matching threads, and one yard of quilt batting, at least 45″ wide.

 

The first thing to do is to baste the top & the batting together. It is kind impossible to get a photo of this while actually doing it, but fortunately it is very simple to actually do.

In a very well ventilated area, lay your quilt top face down. Shake the basting spray before use. Lightly spray on the back side of the fabric using a sweeping motion about 8″-10″ away from the fabric. Allow it to dry until tacky, for about 5 minutes.

Once it’s dry, lay the fabric over the batting and smooth from the middle to the edge. The piece of batting should be larger than the quilt top, allowing you to get a very smooth placement. You’ll trim the batting later on. If you need to adjust the placement over the batting, just remove the fabric & make any adjustments necessary. No need to spray again, it should still be tacky.

Once the fabric is smoothed out over the batting nicely, it’s time to pin the backing on.

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Try to cut your back piece (the grey sheeting) to be exactly the same as your actual top. Pin the quilt back on the right side of the quilt top. I like to give myself a ‘reminder’ not to sew completely around the quilt by double pinning the opening.

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Sew around the perimeter of the quilt, leaving yourself an opening of at least 6 inches. I used 3/8″ seam allowance.

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Trim the excess batting, then turn right side out.

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Iron the quilt, pressing especially the opening closed.

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If you want your thread to match the fabrics, now is when you should switch to grey. Since there are only two white squares on the perimeter, I kept the grey. Just be sure to sew slow & steady. Change your stitch to 2.6 or 2.8, then top stitch all the way around, closing the opening and leaving a nice ‘border’ around the quilt. I continued a 3/8″ seam allowance, and used my walking foot. If you have a walking foot, I recommend using it for the top stitch, as well as the quilting. It will help to reduce puckering and slipping of the fabric.

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As for the quilting, there is certainly more than one way to do it. I’ll share what I did, and why.

I chose one corner of the quilt, and sewed a diagonal line through each square until I reached the other side of the quilt. I then placed my needle down & pivoted the quilt to repeat, over and over, until there was a diagonal line stitched through every square. I used a few different colors of thread just to add a subtle touch of color. I was originally going to repeat this process so that there was an x through every square, but I actually really liked the way that it looked, so I considered myself finished at that point.

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There are so many ways that you could tweak this to your personal preferences. I’d love to see what you do with it! You could quilt as I originally planned to, you could quilt lines up and down the entire thing, you could add a binding like Robyn did in this tutorial, [18] not to mention quilting each square differently & individually!

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I’m really, really thrilled with how this blanket turned out, and I’m thrilled to share it with you!

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